A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change

by Douglas Thomas, John Seely Brown

<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {"Table Normal"; ""; 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; %; "Calibri","sans-serif"; "Times New Roman"; "Times New Roman"; } <![endif]--> The twenty-first century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning , Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic. Typically, when we think of culture, we think of an existing, stable entity that changes and evolves over long periods of time. In A New Culture , Thomas and Brown explore a second sense of culture, one that responds to its surroundings organically. It not only adapts, it integrates change into its process as one of its environmental variables. By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, the authors create a vision of learning for the future that is achievable, scalable and one that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it. The result is a new form of culture in which knowledge is seen as fluid and evolving, the personal is both enhanced and refined in relation to the collective, and the ability to manage, negotiate and participate in the world is governed by the play of the imagination. Replete with stories, this is a book that looks at the challenges that our education and learning environments face in a fresh way. PRAISE FOR A NEW CULTURE OF LEARNING “A provocative and extremely important new paradigm of a ‘culture of learning’, appropriate for a world characterized by continual change. This is a must read for anyone interested in the future of education.”
James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus, University of Michigan “Thomas and Brown are the John Dewey of the digital age.” Cathy Davidson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University “ A New Culture of Learning may provide for the digital media and learning movement what Thomas Paine’s Common Sense did for the colonists during the American Revolution— a straightforward, direct explanation of what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against.” Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor, USC “ A New Culture of Learning is at once persuasive and optimistic — a combination that is all too rare, but that flows directly from its authors’ insights about learning in the digital age. Pearls of wisdom leap from almost every page.” Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan “Brilliant. Insightful. Revolutionary.” Marcia Conner, author of The New Social Learning “Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown portray the new world of learning gracefully, vividly, and convincingly.” Howard Gardner, Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education “Thomas and Brown make it clear that education is too often a mechanistic, solo activity delivered to the young. It doesn’t have to be that way—learning can be a messy, social, playful, embedded, constant activity. We would do well to listen to their message.” Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus “Anyone who fears, as I do, that today’s public schools are dangerously close to being irrelevant must read this book. The authors provide a road map—and a lifeline—showing how schools can prosper under the most difficult conditions. It is a welcome departure from all the school bashing.” John Merrow, Education Correspondent, PBS NewsHour “American education is at a crossroads. By illuminating how play helps to transform both information networks and experimentation, and how collective inquiry unleashes the power of imagination, A New Culture of Learning provides an irresistible path to the future.” Joel Myerson, Director, Forum for the Future of Higher Education

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching, School, Professional Development, Design, Cultural

137 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2011

Reviews

[Kiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book, which is full of interesting ideas and critiques. The main thesis is that the combination of "unlimited" access to information (i.e., the Internet) and an environment with enough structure and boundaries to inspire innovation leads to a "new culture" of learning: playful, exploratory, self-motivated, and *collective*.

Here, collective means that we have the opportunity to learn with and from many others, in a peer-based relationship, in contrast to traditional views of learning that restrict it to a traditional one-way teacher-as-expert and student-as-passive-recipient model.

As a self-motivated learner, I found this book to offer a pretty heady koolaid that I drank right up. In fact my only major quibble was the over-emphasis on how great collective learning can be. Independent learning is mentioned only in passing, yet inspiring solo inquiry and research is very powerful.

Also, the authors get so caught up in gushing about what a great learning environment World of Warcraft is that they overlook existing, traditional arenas in which the exact kind of learning they espouse already happens -- like the library!

Here is a selection of quotes I really liked:
- "For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur."
- "Learning from others is neither new nor revolutionary; it has just been ignored by most of our educational institutions."
- "Students learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment."
- "Expertise is less about having a stockpile of information or facts at one's disposal and increasingly about knowing how to find and evaluate information on a given topic."
- "Instead of posing questions to find answers, it is essential to use answers to find increasingly better questions."

[Carolyn Fitzpatrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a very short book, only 100 pages long, but the author still manages to talk around the topic instead of delivering. He explains that "kids today" are even more ill-suited to lecture than students in the past. There is a lot of talk about how explicit knowledge, like the exact speed of light, is fine presented in the format of lecture or text, but to really understand a topic you need tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge comes from experience and interaction. In a learning environment, you get tacit knowledge by reading the experiences of others, experimenting, and contributing your comments and creations to the community. The author is very dismissive of explicit knowledge, and feels that students shouldn't be taught anything that can't just be Googled, to which I say: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extended_....

Even more frustrating is that he doesn't give any hints as to how teachers can actually do this in the classroom. I thought that we would actually learn how to "cultivate the imagination for a world of constant change," but no. He says that "The new culture of learning is about the kind of tension that develops when students with an interest... are faced with a set of constraints that allow them to act only within certain boundaries." So... examples? steps? case studies? no? The only hint he gives is to say that if a student has a passion for basketball, don't assign basketball themed story problems, instead ask "What is the best way to shoot a basketball?" and let him pursue his own answers. That isn't really very helpful to a teacher trying to design lesson plans. He also describes five characteristics of the "gamer disposition," but nothing about how to leverage these characteristics or what to do with the kids who AREN'T gamers.

Finally, there is the gender issue. The male pronoun is used almost exclusively to describe his students. Possibly because his students are almost exclusively gamers and he's decided that gamer = male. The only women mentioned in the book are a mom in an analogy who likes to game because it brings her family closer together, Annette Lareau's research on income versus access to education. The gamers in all of his examples are supportive and helpful of each other, and embrace diversity. To the author, MMOs are wonderful meritocracies, where everyone is welcome to play. There are a ton of articles out there describing how this is NOT reality, for example: http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinc.... Female characters in games are for the most part drawn to be eye candy, and gay and/or non-white characters are very rare. So I respectfully disagree with his conclusion that gamers are going to save the world. There are some gamers are nice, but quite a few are territorial and selfish.

[Karel Baloun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 2011 book takes a while to get started, at least for this silicon valley reader who doesn’t need 1/3 of the book to explain how the internet has changed casual, lifestyle learning, especially from decade old research. Much less how engaging entertainment learning has become! Nevertheless, even these anecdotes are mostly enjoyable, and all the points are clearly supported and concise.

“We propose reversing the order of things. What if, for example, questions were more important than answers? What if the key to learning were not the application of techniques but their invention? What if students were asking questions about things that really matter to them? [...] Every answer serves as a starting point, not an endpoint. It invites us to ask more and better questions.” p81-2

“Inquiry is the process by which we ask not “What is it that we know?” but “What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them?” p83

"What am I able to explore?"
"How can I utilize the available resources, both social and technological, for deep exploration?"

"Imagine environment for participants are constantly measuring in evaluating their own performances, even if that requires them to do the tools to do it. Imagine borrow or use her in the face dashboard by users help to make sense of the world on their own performance." p106

"Where imaginations play, learning happens. (p120). Thus ends the book, with a pean to the World of Warcraft. If you love MMOs, you may appreciate it, but I still don't see the real world end purpose of this learning, even just for the personal growth of the player.

[Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was written in 2011 but it still feels like the authors are late to the party. They struggle to reconcile explicit and tacit knowledge, advocating for cool and hip pedagogies that appeal to the youths. They use the, at the time, massive popularity of social media and collective efficacy of online communities to establish a new paradigm for how education should work. Using play as a method of discovery and achieving Flow States in learning is an accepted method for curriculum design, and these states of mind are achievable easily in gamification and communal learning. A decade later, though, it’s clear that the damage that living in the social media space has done to the minds of young people. They fail to include any research into how social media engineers manipulate attention seeking behaviors for profit. Again, this was all still somewhat new back then, and I can see the excitement this generated in the authors. But the last thing I’m going to do, as a classroom teacher, is let my students loose on social media platforms as a substitute for the kinds of deep and focused reading we do together on class. Massive online collective learning exists, but research done by Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows (also published in 2011, so the same research was available) reveals how this kind of “learning by firehose” requires our brains to think in very shallow ways, where we never dwell for any length of time on the deeper nuances of ideas and instead move from one idea to the next and think we’ve gained knowledge. This creates a kind of anti intellect which mistrusts deep learning and allows people to remain in a perpetual present. Memory is erased and context is lost.

Ultimately he turns his argument in how effective games like World of Warcraft are for engaging people in the kinds of skills collective efficacy can generate like teamwork and personal accountability for learning. Millions of hours are spent beating bad guys together in raids which reveal a kind of communal success we can learn from. Jane Mcgonigal, in her book “Reality is Broken” wrote about this exact phenomenon, but she asked a followup question which this book does not: WoW is not the real world. With the millions of hours spent within the game engaging in valuable skills needed to accomplish complex tasks, that’s millions of hour these people could have spent engaging those skills and applying them to real world solutions to real world problems. Why haven’t we done that? Why hasn’t this all transferred?

These questions ruin this books argument. Skills like this are reserved for the virtual space and not the real world. When it comes to real problems, the best solution is to plug back in and forget they exist. This is untenable and a poor model for the future of education. To suggest the best course of action is to replace desks with gaming consuls is to give META what it wants and upload our consciousness directly into the virtual world. Might as well leave our humanity in a pile at the door.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where imaginations play, learning happens...

"What if, for example, questions were more important than answers? What if the key to learning were not the application of techniques but their invention? What if students were asking questions about things that really mattered to them?" ~Thomas

This might be one of the most thought provoking books I've read about learning in awhile...and I read a lot! Thomas explains how play is the key to learning and the most essential skill of the 21st century. This book explores how we can cultivate imagination by designing environments that encourage questioning and innovation. Every educator should read this book to help students and themselves look at information collectively in order to absorb it and make it their own.

[Jarda Kubalik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Summary: World of Warcraft saves the world and brings paradise to Earth. The basic idea is not bad but a lot in the book is too simplified or modified to fit the authors` purpose and lacks broader context.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas and Brown make a great case for why teachers need to create classroom environments where students have time and space to use their imagination, play, and ask questions. This type of environment will cultivate learning in the 21st century where our world is in constant flux. They use World of Warcraft as an analogy for this new culture of learning, which brings to light the importance of inquiry, questioning, collaboration (which they call the collective), imagination, and play. This book is an easy read with many examples to keep you engaged and get teachers thinking about how to apply these concepts to their own classroom.

[Richard (Rick) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dated, but good summary of both sociocultural perspectives on learning and how modern social media/technologies are dramatically changing education due to the new possibilities these technologies afford for collaborative co-construction of learning. I've been a fan of John Seely Brown's ideas on this topic for a while, so the content of the book wasn't surprising to me and is basically what he presented to us at BYU in his visit to us in 2009. As I said, the book is dated ... but still relevant, and it was interesting to hear the examples.

For people new to John Seely Brown's ideas on social life of information and learning, this is a quick and good introduction!

[The Lazy Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating exploration of how the internet is proving the old, 18th century static system of education increasingly obsolete, inconsistent and ill-equipped for the new, technological age of constant change and disruption.
It posits the solution in Internet play, niche online hobby communities and gaming, which is definitely exciting to think about it. Worth a read.

[Aglafan2 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting book but I was forced to read it

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This slim volume provided some interesting food for thought regarding education in the 21st century. The culmination is primarily an argument for utilizing gaming as valid learning platform. Although well-reasoned and supported, it failed to address several problems incuding: meeting state and national standards, evaluation and how to deal with students who do not succeed in the gaming culture. What this book does bring to the table is an interesting discussion of tacit vs. explicit learning. Most of our education system is based on explicit learning, knowledge that does not change. Today most of our knowledge changes rapidly and can be found quickly in print or electronic resources. State and national standards focus primarily on explicit learning. Is our educational system out of date not because of HOW we are teaching but more because of WHAT we are teaching? The authors also discuss the concept of indwelling; where ideas and processes become so ingrained they are second nature. This is not a new idea. I think that considering all that must be learned in K-12 education today, expecting any kind of indwelling in our public schools is fairly unrealistic. Does that mean we need to get rid of standards of explicit learning and more toward more flexible, changing tacit understanding of our world? The authors never directly address this.

Unfortunately this book leaves me with more questions that lead nowhere than answers. Perhaps they are ideas ahead of their times, but except for a few notable gaming curricula out there, I'm not sure these ideas have any practical application to current teaching practice.

[Paul Signorelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

If doing is learning, there's plenty to learn and do with the ideas Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown present in "A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change." Working with the theme of social/collaborative learning that we've also encountered in many other recent books and articles, Thomas and Brown take us through a stimulating and brief--but never cursory--exploration of "the kind of learning that will define the twenty-first century." And it won't, they tell us right up front, be "taking place in a classroom--at least not in today's classroom. Rather, it is happening all around us, everywhere, and it is powerful" (p. 17). What flows through much of Thomas and Brown's work--and what we observe in our own training-teaching-learning environments--is what they address explicitly near the end of their book after having discussed the importance of learning environments: the need to foster playfulness in learning and the parallel need to work toward a framework of learning that builds upon the Maker movement and that acknowledges three essential facets for survival in contemporary times: "They are homo sapiens, homo faber, and homo ludens--or humans who know, humans who make (things), and humans who play" (p. 90). All of which leads us to an obvious conclusion: if we are inspired to do the things within our communities, collectives, and organizations that Thomas and Brown describe and advocate, we will be engaged in building the new culture of learning they describe--while learning how to build it.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a manifesto of BIG IDEAS. While maddeningly vague and sometimes frustratingly nonlinear, the authors' arguments offer a provocative and serious challenge to educators. By highlighting the strong suits of internet-based learning communities, they reveal how effectively (some) students can learn outside the traditional institutions of education. The challenge, as a college teacher, is how to adapt their ideas into a more traditional college classroom, semester, degree plan, etc.

One thing to note: the authors *assume* a certain level of familiarity with online learning collectives. If you don't even know what I mean by that phrase, you're going to struggle with this book, because they don't offer a lot of concrete illustrations for their points. And even if they did, you might have a hard time truly understanding how these organisms work if you've never participated in one. This problem is why, ultimately, the book was a failure as the text for my summer reading group for college faculty. Too few of the group members had any personal experience with the technologies and online collectives that the authors were trying to analyze. This is NOT a book for techno-novices. Still, it's a great place for sparking some deep thinking about how people learn and how some aspects of higher education might need some adjusting.

[Elina Salminen · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Seely Brown was introduced to me (in conversation, not in person) as a visionary who will turn by brain inside out. Which admittedly is a pretty tough expectation to live up to. But as I was reading his collaboration with Douglas Thomas, I was fluctuating between rolling my eyes and going "Well, that's kind of interesting."

So, the good: Thomas and Seely Brown make an argument that learning has already changed, and that the education system needs to catch up. The change is reflected best in online environments ranging from gaming to nerding out about Harry Potter, and consists of constant learning driven by publicly available resources and personal motivation. Furthermore, it's increasingly a collective enterprise, inquiry-based, and "tacit" (a term inspired by Polanyi), ie, not reducible to lists of facts you can master. Some of their examples raise good questions: if most US undergraduates cannot point to Iraq on a paper map but most of them can find it on Google Maps and think about things like satellite view vs map view in the process, what do we make of it. Do we live in dark times of alternative facts and ignorance, or are we actually seeing a reasonable shift from rote learning to deeper engagement and thinking? Or, you know, which shades of gray between those two extremes do we actually inhabit?

It seems like surely there is much to draw on there, and maybe I'm just not visionary enough to appreciate some of their arguments. But in places they seem naive about the limits of "personal motivation" - or maybe I'm naive about what the goals of education should be. They mention the importance of boundaries and structure to prevent aimless floundering amidst the Internet of Wonderful Things, but their examples seem to trust that as long as you let people geek out on things, meaningful learning will occur. In places they seem downright unrealistic, enthusiastically quoting a University of Michigan Vice Provost who argued UM "really" trains 250,000 students each year because enrolled students share their learning online.

I think there's food for thought here, especially the relationship between public knowledge(-making) and personal motivation. For me, the disjuncture lies in the fact that the book doesn't really offer a convincing roadmap to actually operationalize any of the claims they make. If the goal is to gamify everything, they don't really give the reader an idea of how to do it, apart from presenting it as a thing that just organically happens. Perhaps this is partly because the book came out in 2011, but the ideas it presents are no longer hugely radical (there's an entire gameful learning center at UM now, for example) but also not nuanced by observations about actual gameful learning in higher ed.

[Jody Frodahl]

In the book A New Culture of Learning, Thomas and Brown pose the following question: “What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?” (17). Through analogy to gaming communities, blogs, and other collectives (content-neutral platforms that are defined by the interactions among participants), the authors present a new vision for learning that is interactive, social, and playful.

According to the authors, learning groups that mirror collectives foster the self-directed learning and imagination that is necessary in the rapidly changing world of the 21st Century. In a collective, “people move in and out of the group at various times for various reasons, and their participation may vary based on topic, interest, experience, or need” (54). Members of a collective share a passion for a similar topic and are intrinsically motivated to discover and learn. The authors justify their belief that education would operate more effectively if structured to resemble a collective platform for learning by citing the ability of blogs (a type of collective) to educate. They claim that in a blog there is a “shift in authorship and authority” (65) which is similar to the shift that has resulted in education due to digital media. In a blog, individuals are not only influenced by the information but are also able to influence the information by providing comments and external links. Clearly, the active participation of others is fundamental to the process of learning in a blog. Therefore, it makes sense to argue that education would be greatly improved if restructured to “mimic the interactivity that modern media invites” (66). Thomas and Brown clearly explain how structuring education to be more fluid, like the collectives that have shown how to foster authentic learning, is a necessary component for cultivating a new culture of learning.

Also, the authors argue that learning must be social and playful. Education experts such as Prensky have shown that an ideal learning environment includes one in which students make connections that are grounded in experience and based on student-passions. The authors of this book cite studies by Lareau that show how “general attitudes toward learning and specific approaches to skills or areas of interest” greatly influence learning (72). When learning is part of the social environment, people learn by watching and experiencing the digital world around them. In addition, the authors make the statement that “play...is probably the most overlooked aspect in understanding how learning functions in culture” (97). When people “play” they discover different possibilities which can cause a shift in perspective. Through play, people interact and create meaning. Thomas and Brown conclude that “play reveals a structure of learning that is radically different from the one that most schools or other formal learning environments provide, and which is well suited to the notions of a world in constant flux” (97). Play is an essential component of the inquiry-based learning emphasized in innovative 21st Century classrooms..

In the book A New Culture of Learning, authors Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown create a moving proposal for the change that is needed to education. Their vision is optimistic yet practical. While they passionately argue that education needs to be personalized, playful, and “messy”, they also acknowledge the importance of structure and boundaries in the proposed learning collectives. They provide analogies that help to justify their proposed changes. I especially appreciated the gaming analogy. They wrote, “we look to gamers because they don’t just embrace change, they demand it. Their world is in a state of constant flux, and it must continually be reinvented and reimagined through acts of collective imagination. That’s what makes the game fun. But while players defeat bosses, kill monsters, coordinate raids, find new armor, and read blogs, wikis, and forums, learning happens, too” (115). This book provides relevant anecdotes to justify the underlying theme that people of all ages learn by doing, asking new questions, and working together to solve problems. With an emphasis on informal learning, it is a must read for educators who truly seek a new vision for 21st Century learning. Douglas Thomas, associate professor in Communication at USC, has focused his research on how technology and culture intersect and provides valuable insights in the book about the necessary change to education being a cultural shift in attitude. He has also published journals on game research which greatly contributed to the analogy connecting learning to video games. John Seely Brown, scientist, scholar, and cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning integrated principles from his book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion to propose a plan that makes the learning required in the 21st Century possible.

[Colby McKenzie Clifford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moments of greatness with this book, but it will take imagination indeed to balance real world curriculum requirements in the authors’ new culture of learning.

Yes, the world is constantly changing, more so every day. We do need to modify the way we approach instruction and how we create learning environments. “There is a difference in learning and being taught.”

"The trick is to figure out how to harness these new resources, which make play, questioning, and imagination the bedrocks of our new culture of learning. The question is: In the twenty-first century, how do we cultivate the imagination?" p.20

"How powerful it can be when students see each other as resources and figure out how to learn from one another." p.25

On the need for teaching reading instruction in a new way: (rather, think critically while reading)
"Wikipedia allows us to see all those things, understand the process, and participate in it. As such, it requires a new kind of reading practice, an ability to evaluate a contested piece of knowledge and decide for yourself how you want to interpret it. And because Wikipedia is a living, changing embodiment of knowledge, such a reading practice must embrace change." p.47

"In other words, as children encounter new places, people, things, and ideas, they use play and imagination to cope with the massive influx of information they receive."p.47
IE:
"A child playing with a new toy and an adult logging onto the Internet for example both wonder, 'What do I do now? How do I handle this new situation, process this new information, and make sense of this new world?' This alters the formula: In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it. (the idea that we should "grow up" and not play [connection to Dewey's theory that adults should be growing down in some ways and embrace child-like approaches to play?])

The idea of the COLLECTIVE.
"We call this environment a collective. As the name implies, it is a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater than the sum of its parts." p.52
"We see collectives as the creations of play and imagination in an era of digital media. They are, in that sense, a product of a changing world that can no longer focus on a single, national sense of community. But collectives are also a nearly infinite set of resources that any individual can selectively tap into and participate in as part of his or her own identity." p.59

"Learning in an age of constant change simply never stops. In the new culture of learning, the bad news is that we rarely reach any final answers. But the good news is that we get to play again, and we may find even more satisfaction in continuing the search." p.73 (The search for answers? As in the learning process itself?)

The TACIT
"Michael Polanyi, a scientist turned philosopher, wrote a great deal about the concepts of knowledge and knowing. In a short book called The Tacit Dimension, he begins with a very simple premise: 'We know more than we can tell.' What he describes is the tacit dimension of knowledge, which is the component of knowing that is assumed, unsaid, and understood as a product of experience and interaction." p.74
"The twenty-first century belongs to the tacit. In the digital world, we learn by doing, watching, and experiencing...In a world where things are constantly changing, focusing exclusively on the explicit dimension is no longer a viable model for education...We have had no theories or mechanisms for addressing a world in which context is rapidly changing...until now." p.76
(Except his "theory" seems to amount to using MMOs as a substitute for curriculum?)

"Tacit knowledge which grows through personal experience and experimentation, is not transferable-you can't teach it to me, though I can still learn it. The reason for the difference is that learning tacit knowledge happens not only in the brain but also in the body, through all our sense. It is an experiential process as well as a cognitive one. It is not about being taught knowledge; it is about absorbing it." p.77

(Learning to read on a more basic scale, learning to comprehend what you read, to visualize what you read, and to think about the writing AS YOU READ...can only happen when reading.)

INQUIRY
"What if questions were more important than answers? What if the key to learning were not the application of techniques but their invention? What if students were asking questions about things that really mattered to them?" (What if I give 'answers' then ask why and how they are correct?)

"You can sometimes learn more from taking the wrong approach than you can from taking the right one. When you focus on continually asking better questions, you rely on the tacit and use your imagination to delve deeper and deeper into the process of inquiry."p.84

INDWELLING
(Not sure about tying it all together this way.)
"The more we engage with the process of asking questions, the more we tend to engage with the tacit dimension of knowledge. Indwelling is the set of practices we use and develop to find and make connections among the tacit dimensions of things. it is the set of experiences from which we are able to develop our hunces and sense of intuition." p.85
(Are some more connected to intuition? As a type of intelligence?)

"When we think about engaging the passion of the learner, we need to think about her sense of indwelling, because that is her greatest source of inspiration, but it is also the largest reservoir she has of tacit knowledge." p.85 (And this can best be built by reading more.)

***********
"Since many of the places we now look for information do not carry the institutional warrants that have traditionally been used as markers for accuracy or truth, learning to navigate through and evaluate them-an expanded notion of literacy-is now critically important. We need to learn to read in a whole new way." p.96
***********

"Imagine an environment where participants are constantly measuring and evaluation their own performances, even if that requires them to build new tools to do it. Imagine and environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews not to determine rewards but to continually enhance performance."p.106

THE VIRTUAL SPACE FOR COLLECTIVE INDWELLING (I mean....what?)
This is the exact opposite of what public school is. Public school is the physical space for collective measuring.

"It is essential to use answers to find increasingly better questions. When we address a problem like a puzzle or a game, we engage in acts of productive inquiry, where the answers we find become part of our stockpile of information, which can then be used to find better and more interesting questions as well as to solve future problems." p.117

So. YES. It will take a lot of imagination to balance curriculum requirements in this new culture of learning.

[Ahmed Hamad · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I like this book. While it provides some cool ideas about a new age of learning, the dramatization and overstatement of how cool these ideas are sucks. Using the internet and the tools that technology has provided us with to connect for learning certainly can be helpful, but to go ahead and claim that we should make this the center of a new age of learning is dangerous. It can easily lead to the deterioration of education and the facilities of the mind along with it. It is understandable that traditional education has done so much damage already to the extent where we feel we must rebel against it, but to leap blissfully to a learning style where rules nearly do not exist definitely won't help us progress.

Having said that, reading this book has pushed me to ask myself many questions about the nature of learning in the modern age, and for that I must give it a bonus star.

Oh, and the writing style is just deplorable.

[Aaron Schumacher · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book and it introduced me to the word aporia, which I appreciate. Here is a definition that comes up on Google:

aporia: an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory

Here is a summary of this book, in one quote from its page 107:

In our view, MMOs are almost perfect illustrations of a new learning environment.

I have minor gripes and major gripes about this book. A minor gripe is they say "petri dish" a lot, and I think they shouldn't. A major gripe is that the whole book is essentially a false dichotomy between a straw man version of schooling and impoverished, unworkable gesticulations labeled "new learning." It isn't that there aren't any good ideas here, but they are old ideas misunderstood and presented as if new.

Skip this book.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very accessible but somewhat superficial introduction to how learning is changing from a more authoritarian educational approach to something characterised by play and membership in various interest-based collectives. There's a lot of good points here which illustrate how the internet, in particular, is making learning more democratic - how by participating in things like message forums and fanfiction and online games people are learning specialist knowledge and critical reading skills and cooperation, which is undoubtedly true. Admittedly it also seems, as someone who is terminally connected to the internet, fairly obvious.

I appreciate that it was written in a way that laypeople can understand, though. Accessible academic writing is a severely underrated skill.

[Andrew A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read with some good ideas laid out in an easy to read/understand format. Not 100% on board with the whole conclusion though, talking about World of Warcraft being the pinnacle of, "indwelling," and, "collective." I was a gamer as a kid and while I see the argument being made, there's a line between translating that problem-solving to the real world. I would've liked to see people listed as WOW players who have contributed in some way, with a thesis, or research, or an invention of some kind.

The book will definitely challenge your take on what education will look like in the future and I added a few things to my toolbox after reading this.

[Oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting point of view about a way about learning. An interesting perspective with quite strong arguments. Although--if this is true, we will see more use of this unusual strategy to learning in the near future. I definitely will look into implementing this type learning process in my classroom. It will be an excellent experiment and who knows? I may get a confirmation to their approach.....or not.

Strongly recommend as a way to change our current teaching methods--or at least try something different.

[Marco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting insights on the transition from a teaching-centered to a learner-centered and more distributed, peer-to-peer, interactive culture of learning. Aside from some insights, the book is overrated and a bit shallow in the core argument it makes. Less of a book's core argument and more like a series of blog posts on a technology magazine. You might want to read it if you have a spare day during a weekend and have not much else to do, OR if the topic is very dear to you

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a throwback to the "Web 2.0" hysteria for me. Reading it in today's context shows how overstated were the claims that the Internet was going to transform culture into a collaborative, understanding utopia. Nevertheless, there are some very helpful concepts in this book, most notably for me the concept of a "collective" as opposed to a "community."

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

They have a moderately interesting idea with no clear way of how you implement this in areas of teaching that do not directly lend themselves to World of Warcraft or the like. But maybe I just don't get it. Also would be curious to know (I will google it) if more men than women play these"MMOs" b/c these solutions seemed male-oriented. Still, some ideas that I will ponder.

[Anip Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elucidates the new culture of learning that is the need of the hour in the 21st century by focussing on the interplay of knowing making and playing. extremely inclined to the idea presented about collective indwelling and how people and learning flourish in an environment with tremendous resources and defined boundaries.

[B. Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of the readings for my studio pedagogy class. It doesn't really have to deal with art, but more with the way people learn. I've had to thoroughly discuss this book for weeks, so I won't put too much detail here. I think some aspects of it were too simplistic, but the overall message is good.

[Avery Mason · Rating 1 out of 5]

they definitely wrote this book thinking that this would change everything. but instead it changes nothing. it’s like two old dudes in a nursing home talking about how exciting technology is. as if most new teachers have grown up around it. had to read it for a class, throughly did not enjoy. they NEVER got to the point.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is at least 7 years old and I have read it three times. It is an inspiring, easy read. Great for facilities or policymakers. If you loved Ken Robinson's TedTalk you will love this book. I like it better than Robinson's books.

[Sarah Maier · Rating 4 out of 5]

The discussion on how gamers learn was quite interesting. My husband is a gamer and a great learner. A good, fast read.

[Rebecca Hermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview and concept but didn't go as deep into application as I would have liked.